My daughter was once a good baker who pretended to be a good cook so she could be a contestant on Chopped Junior. I am a good cook who pretended to be a baker on the “Great British Baking Show” yesterday. If you are not familiar with GBBS, it is your best life lived in a beautifully appointed kitchen where other people are paid to clean up after you with baking friends who are kind and supportive and who apply light touches to the opening and closing of oven and refrigerator doors.
The occasion for the competition—which I played against the limitations of my home kitchen and personality—was the arrival in my house of a box of pears. We don’t like pears. What am I supposed to do with pears? Oh, thank you, Google. A Tarte Bourdaloue is what one does with pears when one has a brain full of the GBBS.
First, about me. I bake three desserts in rotation.
- Chocolate chip cookies. My secret is to hold back on the flour, which produces a stretchy, gooey, flat mess. Perfect.
- Upside-down marzipan cake with dried fruit on top. My mother picked this recipe out of Gourmet Magazine, and I reproduced it in 1997 as a Peace Corps volunteer in Papua New Guinea with marzipan given to me by some Germans. I brought this elegant cake to the expat club and set it down next on a bar that had just been cleared of two dozen empty cans of SP beer, the drink of choice among ex-colonizer Aussies. They gathered round in their muddy work outfits and tucked into my Gourmet Magazine cake with an implement I had never seen them use: a fork. “Aw, this is legend,” they said.
- I sometimes make pignoli, because the recipe always looks really easy, but then I end up being reminded that I forgot to replace the broken hand-held mixer. (More later.)
That aside was relevant as a way to point out that I am impatient and I don’t bake pastry. Over the past decade, however GBBS has given me a pastry-making education. Through the show I have been introduced to the terms short crust, rough puff, full puff, hot water, and choux. From what I can tell, short crust is made in a mixer, choux and hot water are cooked in a pot, and full puff and rough puff are produced by masochists. I am familiar with mixers where I am not familiar with stove-top dough or masochism, so that is the second reason, after the pear supply, why I landed on a Tarte Bourdaloue.
Step One: Watch a tutorial on YouTube on how to make Tartes Bourdaloue. Two minutes later, I feel confident that I have all the knowledge I need.
Step Two: Locate a metal tin like the one in the video. No can do. I wonder if a spring-form cake pan will work, before landing on a glass pie dish.
Step Three: The video helpfully has words overlaid on it, but they are flying by too fast, so I slow the video to half speed. Now I have four minutes of knowledge to draw from. The video shows hands dumping first butter then something called icing sugar into a mixer. No doubt powdered sugar is the normal version of icing sugar, so, sorted. But how much of each? In the video she makes it look like half a stick and half a cup. Amounts are included in the description, but they are written in code. Although the tips of fingers are covered in sugar, I must transfer them to the keyboard, to learn what 100 grams means in real language.
Step Four: Somehow get a blob of wet tart dough out of the mixer in an orderly fashion and turn it into a flat, cohesive circle like the one the video lady produces. As large flecks of buttery dough escape from my effort at a cohesive circle and begin to cover my countertop appliances, stove top, floor, and ceiling, a French word pops up on the screen to name the medieval torture process by which they got there. It is called “fraisage.”
Half an hour later, hands caked in raw Tarte Bourdaloue, I curse the nation of France and slam the fridge door shut after having shoved into it a misshapen slab of dough.
Step Five: Poach pears in water with some lemon juice, sugar, and vanilla. How much water is 1.5 litres? Let’s say half a pot. Half a pot sounds good.
Step Six: Make the frangipane, which is just like short-crust pastry, but with more eggs. The video lady pipes the frangipane with a pastry bag, which I, of course, do not have, so I jerry-rig a Ziploc bag with a cut on the corner (a “kitchen hack” as they say in food TV world) and, pleased with myself for the first time in this process, start piping from the center of the tart and moving outward. But my frangipane isn’t mixed very well because I mixed it in a standing mixer rather than with the handheld mixer that is broken, so the butter separates out and the whole thing is bursting through a hole in the Ziploc until finally I say, “F-it,” and dump the stuff out of the bag and into the tin and spread it around with a butter knife because I also have no offset spatula.
Step Seven: The pear-slicing and pear-placement parts of this competition were legit fun. I might be convinced to suffer the whole thing again just for this step.
Step Eight: Achieve my closest approximation to an actual GBBS contestant by sitting in front of the oven for 20 minutes to observe the rising of my frangipane and the sinking of my pears.
Final Step: Have husband rest a six pack of beer on top of tarte in the backseat of the car. (It’s fine, it’s fine, everything’s fine. It’s just one caved-in pear.)
What would GBBS judge Paul Hollywood have to say about my Tarte Bourdaloue? Here is how I imagine the moment. He would take a bite and then lean over the table as he chewed thoughtfully. There would be several silent moments, as the suspense slowly built. Then he would shake his head in disbelief, return to a standing position, wipe his hands against one another, smile his gorgeously winning smile, and announce, “Perfect. I can’t fault it. The short crust is cooked to perfection, the frangipane is light,” pause for another head shake and disbelieving giggle, “and the pears aren’t too sweet or too soft. Well done.”
Then he would shake my hand, and the room would break out in applause.
Reviews in the real world for my tarte were mostly positive, but I couldn’t tell if the praise—“This is great, Auntie Sheela,” and, “Wow, thanks, Mom”—were derived from real enjoyment or were a result of my having spent the dinner hour informing my companions about how much friggin’ time it took to make one measly pie.
Tarte Bourdaloue by the numbers:
Step at which I started asking questions like “Who does this?”: 3
Kitchen implements the recipe required that I did not have: 4
Steps listed in recipe skipped entirely: 1 (the world does not need parbaking, please)
Minutes it took to make over the number of minutes it takes to make chocolate chip cookies: 195
